LAST WEEK, Jewish communities around the world read Parashat Lech Lecha, in which Avraham is commanded to circumcise every male child on the eighth day: “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations.” (Genesis 17:12)
For one small community of Ethiopian Jews living as refugees in South Sudan, that ancient command was not just a reading. It was a promise kept.
On Friday, 9 October 2026, Adane Mekonen held his newborn son as the community gathered around him. It was the baby’s eighth day. Wrapped in white, surrounded by men in kippot and tallitot, with an Israeli flag hanging behind them, the boy entered the covenant of Avraham and received his name: Levi.
“Even though we are in exile, in a non-Jewish country, and we are in challenging times,” Adane wrote to African Jewish Voices, “nothing can stop us from preserving and following our identity and the Torah system and laws that our ancestors inherited.”
A Long Road from Oromia
African Jewish Voices readers first met Adane more than two years ago, when we told how his community from West Wolega in Oromia, Ethiopia, fled war and persecution only to find themselves Trapped in Sudan.
Their journey began with destruction. In 2021, as conflict spread across Ethiopia, their synagogue in West Wolega was burned, along with their homes and religious items. About 50 people fled west on foot. On the way, three of their men, Mulat, Gashawu and Habetamu, were seized for ransom. Mulat was killed. The rest of the group was detained in Asosa for about four months before they were released.
On 20 March 2022, they crossed into Sudan. They hoped they had reached safety. Instead, when other refugees in the camp learned they were Jewish, they were attacked and had to be moved under police protection. Then, on 15 April 2023, Sudan itself erupted into war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. The group found itself in Umrakuba camp, facing hunger, disease, flooding and constant fear, “akin to being on the brink of life and death.”
Once again, the only way forward was to keep moving. Part of the community crossed into South Sudan and now lives on the outskirts of Juba, the capital. Today they number 19 people, including baby Levi. Of the 48 who reached Sudan, others are believed to have stayed behind, too afraid to risk yet another dangerous border crossing.
They chose South Sudan partly in the hope of reaching Israel’s diplomats, who cover South Sudan from the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. It is the door they believe could one day lead them home to Israel.
South Sudan has not ended their struggle. When African Jewish Voices asked Adane about the community’s greatest concerns, he named four.
The first is safety. “Our security is not secure,” he wrote. “We are vulnerable to many different types of thefts and our lives are in a very dangerous situation.”
The second is health. “Juba, South Sudan is a place where malaria is rampant. We do not have money for medical expenses, so our community is suffering a lot.”
The third is food, and the fourth is the children’s schooling. “Their children have been deprived of their education for over 6 years after terrible persecution,” he said.
Six years is most of a childhood. Some of the children who watched Levi’s Brit Milah have spent nearly all of their school years on the run, from Oromia to Asosa, from Sudan’s camps to South Sudan, with no classroom to return to.
Yet the community has not let that loss go unanswered. In videos Adane shared with African Jewish Voices, a little girl in a leopard-print dress stands in a plain room and speaks in Hebrew, a language her elders are teaching her so that wherever the road leads, she will carry her people’s voice with her. With no school to attend, the community has become her classroom.
There is no synagogue they know of nearby, no rabbi and no Jewish community around them. So they have made one of their own. In photos Adane shared, the community celebrates Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah in a modest house outside the city: men wrapped in striped tallitot pray before an Israeli flag pinned to the wall, and families sit around a table set with candles and challah under a blue-and-white cloth. A house became a synagogue, and a table became an altar.
And on the eighth day, in that same spirit, they brought a son into the covenant.
The Oldest Jewish Ritual, in the Youngest Country
There is something deeply fitting about where this Brit Milah took place. South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation. Brit Milah is among the oldest commandments in the Torah, given to Avraham himself, who was also told to leave his homeland and walk toward a land he did not yet know.
Like Avraham, Adane’s community left everything behind. Like Avraham, they are still walking. And like Avraham, they have refused to let the journey break the covenant.
The photos tell the story without words. A white-bearded elder in a kippah bends over the child, while another man in a Star of David kippah leans in to perform the circumcision. A boy in a tallit watches closely, learning what his father and grandfathers learned before him. In a borrowed room, far from Ethiopia and farther still from Jerusalem, the blessings were said as they have been said for more than three thousand years.
Levi is a name with a unique meaning just as many Hebrew names do. In the Torah, Levi was the name Leah gave her third son, saying, “This time my husband will be joined to me.” The name means “joined”. For a child born in exile, it is a fitting name: a boy bound to his people, his Torah and his God, wherever the road leads.
Brothers and Sisters Already Home
Adane’s community is not alone in its longing. Most of Ethiopia’s Beta Israel have already made aliyah. Thousands were brought out through Sudan in Operation Moses in 1984 and 1985, and more than 14,000 were airlifted from Addis Ababa in a single weekend during Operation Solomon in 1991. Today, Israel is home to a large and vibrant Ethiopian Jewish community.
Each year, that community gathers in Jerusalem for Sigd, held 50 days after Yom Kippur. It is an ancient Beta Israel festival of fasting, prayer and renewing the covenant, when generations of Ethiopian Jews looked toward Jerusalem and prayed to return. As we described in Ancient Roots, Modern Celebration: Sigd Observed in Jerusalem, it is now celebrated in Jerusalem itself, the city those prayers once reached toward.
This year, as Sigd approaches again in early November, 19 Jews in South Sudan will offer that same prayer, still on the road. It’s been two and a half years since we first told their story. Yet, Adane’s community is still waiting: for safety, for medical care against malaria, for food, for schools, and for someone to open the door to Israel.
Today, though, there is one more reason to hope. Mazal tov to Adane and his family on the birth and Brit Milah of their son, Levi. May he grow to Torah, to the marriage canopy and to good deeds, and may he and his family soon know a home without fear.